What formative assessment looks like in twelve minutes

The routine, not the feature list

Call the register. Open the lesson that was planned. While the class works, mark a handful of learners against the indicators for that strand — emerging, meeting, exceeding — on the same device that holds the plan. Move to the next group. Close the session. That is the job. The product that survives is the one that fits in those minutes, not the one that asks for a rubric workshop first.

Workspace is built so a teacher can assess a full class in under two minutes when the indicators are already on the lesson. Evidence lives on the learner profile. The point is not speed for its own sake. The point is that the grey area is still warm: you can reteach before the scheme has moved on.

What 208 teachers already said

In March 2024, 90 percent of the 208 Kenyan teachers 60 Decibels rang said they run CBC assessments on the platform. Ninety-four percent create digital lesson plans. Seventy-two percent open Kurasa five days a week — and those five-day users reported stronger quality of life, practices, time, confidence, participation and academics than teachers who opened it one to four days. Formative work is not an event. It is the weekday habit.

Those figures stay in that study. They are teacher-reported. They are not the 10M+ lifetime assessments on the home page, and they are not a promise that twelve minutes feels short on a bad network. Forty percent of the same sample had hit a snag. The routine has to assume the snag.

With the curriculum, not instead of it

Kurasa does not replace official CBC documents. Strands and substrands, indicators, rubrics — those belong to the curriculum. The software holds a living record of how this class met them this week. EdTech Hub’s 2023 write-up of the community showcase put it as scaffolding: so teachers can see learner outcomes in time to teach differently. Kirinyaga, with Brink, Jacobs Foundation and TSC, is the public-school chapter of that same idea. The findings helped take Kurasa into public schools. The twelve minutes still belong to the teacher.

What this is not

It is not a claim that every lesson yields a complete competency map. It is not PSL. A termly sitting is a different clock. It is not Daily Challenge: five questions after supper are a family habit, not formative assessment of the lesson you just taught. Mixing those clocks is how a classroom routine becomes a product tour.